Pierre-Simon Ballanche
French writer and philosopher
Pierre-Simon Ballanche (4 August 1776 – 12 June 1847) was a French writer and counterrevolutionary philosopher, who elaborated a theology of progress that possessed considerable influence in French literary circles in the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was the ninth member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1842.
Life and career
Early years
Born in Lyon, Ballanche was seventeen when his imagination was marked for life by the horrors of the French Revolution. In 1793, the city's royalist revolt against the authority of the revolutionary Convention ended with guillotining or summary execution of about 700 people. This, and an unhappy love affair early in life, left him with an abidingly tragic view of life as sanctified suffering, a view that he embodied in his works, of which the best known was an unfinished multi-part work entitled Essais de palingénésie sociale ("Essays on Social Palingenesis"). "Palingenesis" was a term by which Ballanche referred to the successive regenerations of the society, and he incorporated a progressive vision of Christianity in his work even as he insisted reverently that Christianity was forever immutable.
Career
Ballanche first earned his living as a printer. His first published work was Du sentiment considéré dans son rapport avec la littérature (1802), a work in the vein of Chateaubriand's recently published Génie du christianisme. He made the acquaintance of Julie Récamier in 1812, and moved to Paris shortly thereafter, where he attended regularly her salon at l'Abbaye-aux-Bois.
In works like Antigone (1814), Essais sur les institutions sociales ("Essay on Social Institutions", 1818), Le Vieillard et le jeune homme ("The Old Man and the Youth", 1819), L'Homme sans nom ("The Man without a Name", 1820) and Élégie ("Elegy", 1820), he developed the idea that the French Revolution was endowed with a divine significance.
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